The object of study that prompts Barasch’s account is a funerary stele from the third or fourth century C.E. discovered in Lower Egypt. What particularly interests Barasch in the stele is that “both the combination of different techniques and the ambiguities in reading the image depicted on the stele visually manifest what was perhaps the central theme that occupied the mind of Egypt at that time – the interaction, conflictual as well as mutually complementary, of different cultures.”